A Colombian View Of Venezuela
January 02, 2003
By Hector Mondragon
At the petroleum refinery of Barrancabermeja the workers who
are consigned to hard manual labour are called 'lungos'. There are a
lot of them and they earn very little. They are almost all temporary
labourers and they live in the poor neighbourhoods. When the 'lungos'
go on strike, technology guarantees that production doesn't totally
stop-so even when the majority of the workers are united in protest, if
they can't actually stop the plant from functioning, the engineers,
supervisors, and managers can keep the refinery going under
'contingency plans'.
Right now the oil-workers union of Colombia, USO (Union Sindical
Obrera), is getting ready to go on strike in response to the Uribe
government's offensive. That offensive is headed by Isaac Yanovich, a
businessman from the private banking sector who has been named
president of the state oil company. The workers, who struggled and won
the creation of a national oil company (Ecopetrol), have resisted its
privatization for the past 25 years. They have paid a terrible price
for their resistance: 100 union leaders and activists assassinated (4
during 2002, which saw 160 Colombian unionists killed), 2 disappeared,
10 kidnapped, 31 imprisoned (6 of whom are still in prison), and 250
fired (11 of whom were fired just a few days ago).
It is in such difficult conditions that the Colombian oil-workers
are preparing their strike for the beginning of 2003. The victory of
their movement will depend on their ability to halt production. For
this reason the union and the government are both putting forth massive
efforts to win the engineers and supervisors to their side. If the
union is unable to win these over, the workers will have no option but
to occupy the plant. This will mean that they will face military
repression like they did in 1971. In that year, as workers in
the union remember well, worker Fermin Amaya was murdered as he was
about to stop production at the Barranca refinery.
Next door in Venezuela, the world is flipped entirely upside down.
There, the 'lungos' are working intensely while the call to strike is
followed with fervour and without hesitation by the managers. On
December 2 the managerial body of Venezuela's state oil company, PDV
(Petroleros de Venezuela), blocked the entrance to the refinery and
used their vehicles to stop the workers, the 'lungos'-who had showed up
to work in massive numbers-- from entering. The same managerial body
was joined by the executive of labour relations in its attempts to bar
the entry of workers.
But the real strength of the strike in Venezuela has been in the
computers that control the giant and highly automated petroleum
industry. Even though the PDV is nominally state-owned and run, the
computer system is in the hands of the 'mixed' (public-private)
enterprise Intesa. The party with the technical skill in the
partnership is the Science Applications
International Corporation (SAIC)-a transnational computing company.
Among its directors: ex-US Secretaries of Defense William Perry and
Melvin Laird; ex-directors of the CIA John Deutsch, Robert Gates;
Admiral Bobby Ray Inman (ex-director of the National Security Agency);
other retired military staff including Wayne Downing (former commander
in chief of US Special Forces) and Jasper Welch (ex-coordinator of the
National Security Council).
The hold-up of the oil-tankers was directed from these computing
centers. The hold-up was welcomed by various captains, but the tankers
were forced to shore in any case: nothing moves without direction from
the computers, which also stopped key operations in the refineries and
the entry of vital gas for the iron and steel industries of eastern
Venezuela. 'Lungos' from Guayana had to recover the gas.
The high salaries, privileges, and commissions of the managers,
labour relations chiefs, systems engineers, and tanker captains has
become a useful weapon of political control for the transnational
corporations who seek to privatize Venezuela's (and Colombia's,
Ecuador's, and Brazil's) petrol industry.
This 'middle' class with its disposable income is the political base of
the right in Colombia and Venezuela (and its heroes are Bush, Aznar, or
Berlusconi). It is the electoral force behind Colombia's president
Alvaro Uribe Velez and behind the coup in Venezuela. Washington uses
the mailed fist in Colombia and the velvet glove in Venezuela, but in
both cases its local support is from these 'middle' classes who, like
Bush himself, are too deaf to hear of the assassinations of unionists
in Colombia but scream in rage if a hair on the head of a manager or
oil-tanker captain in Venezuela is touched; who are quiet when 2
million Colombians are displaced from their lands but enraged by the
Venezuelan Land Law when it threatens the unproductive ranches of large
Venezuelan landowners.
On September 16 2002, Colombian peasants were treated cruelly for
their protests on the highways. Their food was burned. They were denied
drinking water. They were surrounded by the military and their leaders
were arrested. 3 were disappeared. International delegates were
deported. 7 of the protest leaders have since been assassinated, one
disappeared, and many others harassed and threatened with murder. They
stand accused-of blocking the roads. In Venezuela on the other hand,
the 'middle' and upper classes blocked roads with their Mercedes Benz
and BMWs, and their rights were respected.
In Cali, Colombia, the public service workers have been
protesting privatization. The young workers of the apprentices' union
have been protesting to maintain state control over the apprenticeship
institution, SENA. Both sectors have been incessantly, brutally
attacked and the international media have nothing to say. The media are
silent as well on the daily confrontations on the Caribbean coast of
Colombia when the privatized electricity company tries to cut
electricity to thousands of indebted, poor people. Neither popular
protest nor state repression make the international news if they occur
in Colombia which, to the media, is a land strictly of terrorism and
drugs.
The 'middle' class ought to watch out though-sometimes it can end up
the victim of its own heroes, whether they be politicians like Bush or
the mainstream media itself. That was what happened with the
'corralito' in Argentina, when the whole country-including the 'middle
class'-mobilized against the banks and were denounced for it in the
media.
Until this happen the 'senoritos' in wealthy eastern Caracas, in the
Chico of Bogota and of Miami, will be the darlings of the media.
Hector Mondragon is an economist and activist in Colombia. [This
article was translated from Spanish by Justin Podur.]